Grief Encounters (7 page)

‘Um, let me see. She was with Atkins for fifteen years. She was with Pope possibly twelve years before that. So she was rid of him for anything between fifteen and twenty-seven years.’

‘So where might he have been for that length of time?’ I asked.

They all adopted deep-in-thought poses, Dave with his fist against his forehead, Jeff stroking his chin. ‘Wowee, that’s a difficult one,’ somebody said.

‘Perhaps he’s been on missionary work in Malawi,’ Jeff suggested.

I nodded my approval.

‘Or maybe he’s been with the Antarctic Survey, and they became stranded on an iceberg and have survived on a diet of penguins,’ young Brendan expounded.

‘Could you live that long on chocolate biscuits?’ I wondered.

‘No, silly me.’

Maggie started to speak. ‘Charlie,’ she began, hesitantly, ‘I know this might sound outrageous, but please don’t laugh. When you’re dealing with people whose behaviour deviates somewhat from the norm, you sometimes have to expand the envelope. You don’t think, do you, that it’s just possible that our man may have been, so to speak, living off the hospitality of Her Majesty?’

‘In jail, you mean?’

‘Well, yes, if that’s not a dirty word.’

‘No,’ ‘Nah,’ ‘Never,’ came the disagreement of everybody else.

‘The girl’s got a point,’ I declared, holding up a restraining hand. ‘Perhaps he’s been out of circulation. So how far have you got?’

Dave produced a list. ‘Nine Popes in Heckley, Chas. Fourteen in Leeds. Similar numbers in neighbouring towns. We haven’t checked them all against the PNC but they appear to be a remarkably law-abiding lot. Must be something to do with the name.’

‘Any who stand out?’

‘A couple, but nothing special. We’ll see them first.’

‘What about the prisons?’

‘Haven’t looked, yet. If he murdered Magdalena and he’s been inside for a long term he could be a lifer, in which case he’ll be easy enough to pick up.’

‘A lifer who came out to kill again,’ someone suggested.

‘Which is hardly unknown,’ I admitted.

The average lifer serves about twelve years, but is only released on licence. That’s the life bit. His address would always be on a file somewhere. I had a three-egg omelette for tea, with curly oven chips and marrowfat peas. I brought my easel into the kitchen and ate the meal while studying one of the nearly finished paintings. Abstracts aren’t as easy as people think. There are no rules, no guidelines. You aren’t striving to make the picture look like something. It’s all down to personal taste.

Kandinsky is a hard act to follow. He came to Germany from Russia and became one of the pioneers of pure abstraction. I love his paintings. He wasn’t the typical artist of the time, having trained as a lawyer and dressing accordingly in sober suit and tie. His orderly lawyer’s brain tried to put some discipline into his art, tried to lay down rules. He wrote articles about his theories in which he gave meaning to colours and related them to different musical notes. There’s a name for it, but it escaped me. You play a note, or make a sound, and some people, one in a thousand or so, see a colour. Or they say they do. Connections in their brains are cross-wired, and one stimulus produces more than one response. Kandinsky claimed he was like that, and the experts say that it’s a gift rather than a handicap.

Me? I can’t tell one musical note from another, and they never look like colours. All I know is that I look at one of his paintings and something inside me goes:
Pow! I like that. It pleases me greatly.
Not all of his paintings, but some of them. And I still couldn’t think of the name for it.

I made a few decisions about the painting as I finished my meal. After I’d loaded my plate and cutlery into the dishwasher I made the changes, altering colours, adding some black contours and hard edges here and there, and decided that it was as finished as it would ever be. The final touch was a stylised
CP
in the bottom corner, more as an indicator of which-way-up rather than a claim of ownership. It’s hard work, so after I’d washed my brushes I pulled a couple of cans of lager from the fridge and settled down in front of the television, watching a video of
A Beautiful Mind
that Dave had loaned me. Towards the end of the second can, just as I was realising that all was not as it seemed, I thought of Len Atkins and wondered if he was pulling on a joint, sharing the mellowness.

The waitress lowered the tray containing four large gins and four small bottles of tonic until it rested on the table, and Tristan Foyle placed one of each in front of his wife Fiona and Richard and Teri Wentbridge. He thanked the waitress and cast an approving glance after her as she walked away.

‘How was your quail?’ he asked his wife as he poured tonic into his glass.

‘Delicious. How were the steaks?’

The restaurant was famous for its steaks, and the other three voiced their approval. ‘And cooked just right,’ Teri Wentbridge added. ‘Neither burnt to a crisp nor still in its death throes.’

‘Did you know,’ Tristan asked, ‘that a chef somewhere has invented a device that cooks steaks to perfection, every time? It’s a bit like a toaster, but for steaks.’

‘And I suppose you have part of the action,’ Teri said.

‘No, I missed that one.’

‘Gosh, that’s unlike you, Tristan.’

‘This wine is rather good,’ Richard asserted, tipping his glass to show the last few drops. ‘Where did you find this one, Tristan?’

‘A client recommended it, last week. He’s an importer, good man to know.’

Fiona said: ‘What does he import?’

‘Wine, dumbcluck,’ her husband replied with a smile. He was sitting next to her, opposite Teri, whose leg was stretched out towards him under the table, her shoe-less foot resting on his thigh, making circular movements against it. He reached under the tablecloth and stroked her ankle.

‘Well I didn’t know,’ Fiona protested. ‘He could have imported jellybeans for all I knew.’

‘No, darling, he imports wine.’ He sipped his G and T, then said: ‘So, let’s get down to business. I believe you have something to report, Richard.’

‘Yes, I think I have,’ Richard affirmed, sitting more upright. ‘I think I have,’ and he told them all about his encounter with Miss Gillian Birchall.

The others listened in silence until he’d finished, when Tristan said: ‘And she’s the headmistress?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Of a fee-paying Church of England school?’

Richard tipped his head to one side. ‘Right on.’

‘Wow! That could be quite a comedown, Ricko. The boy done good.’

‘I think so,’ Richard agreed. ‘The complacent Miss Birchall is heading for a mighty fall, no doubt about it, but I’m just not certain how to pull it off.’

‘Have you been to bed with her yet?’ Fiona asked with a giggle.

‘Good God, no,’ he replied.

‘Well I would have thought that would be your first objective. Don’t you think so, Trist? It has a certain poetic justice. Getting one’s own back, and all that. It was people like her that blighted our lives right from the beginning, so do unto others as they did unto you. You should give her one, Richard, and think of England while you do it.’

‘I’ll consider it,’ he replied, ‘but how do you think we should hang her out to dry?’

‘What have you come up with?’ Tristan asked. ‘You must have thought about it.’

‘Mmm, a little. Are we going to Cannes again in September?’

‘We’d better be,’ Teri asserted.

‘OK. Good. I was wondering about inviting her down for a couple of days. We could put her in the apartment. I’d take her out on the yacht and we’d do some topless sunbathing. You could take pictures, Tristan, with a long lens. I reckon the redtops would be interested in them.’

Tristan thought about it, then said: ‘That would be embarrassing, but it’s not a disgrace.’

‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ Wentbridge agreed. ‘I’d have to be in there, too. The married man. That might do it.’

‘And where am I while you’re cavorting with Miss Wonderful?’ Teri demanded. ‘And what if she refused to take her shirt off and show her boobs? I think it’s a daft idea.’

‘OK,’ her husband replied. ‘You think of something better.’

‘A hotel room,’ she stated. ‘Good old-fashioned divorce photos. You and her in bed, or better still, on the bed. Tristan does the private detective bit, with the camera. Bang, flash, Bob’s your uncle, send them to the tabloids.’

‘I suppose so,’ he reluctantly agreed.

Tristan said: ‘How would you lure her into a hotel? We all have perfectly suitable houses.’ After a silence he continued: ‘Do women download pornography? Are there female paedophiles?’

‘There could always be a first time,’ Wentbridge replied.

‘No, we’ve done that,’ Teri objected. ‘Let’s try to be original.’

‘Yeah, Teri’s right,’ Tristan said. ‘If we stick to the same formula someone will rumble us. And it’s too easy and impersonal. Ideally, we’d be there to see the expression on her face as her world turned to ratshit. We need a new approach.’

‘I’ve got it,’ declared Fiona, and the other three turned to face her. ‘Drink driving. Richard gets her drunk one night, when she’s in her car. The police breathalyse her, she gets banned, end of a beautiful career, lots of broken-hearted kiddy-winkies. Serve the bitch right.’

‘She only had an orange juice, Tuesday evening.’

‘Then you’ll have to work at it, won’t you?’

Technology has made us all change the way we work. Sometimes the changes were evolutionary, at others they were violent U-turns that hurled established practices into the hedgerow and caused new ideas to be taken on board with unseemly haste. For three hundred years clocks and watches relied on springs, cogs and balance wheels to keep them accurate, but in the space of a couple of decades these were replaced by vibrating crystals, digital displays and atomic accuracy. Almost overnight the mobile phone has created a world where it is theoretically possible for everyone in it to talk to everyone else in it. And then there are computers…

Thieving cars has evolved alongside everything else. A handful of years ago it was a brick through the side window, smash the steering lock with the same brick, short circuit two wires and you were away. It was upsetting and inconvenient for the car owner, but nobody was hurt.

The car manufacturers have done their bit to improve things, fitting immobilisers and alarms, remote control locks and even keyless systems that unlock the door and switch on the ignition as the rightful owner approaches the vehicle and slides into the driver’s seat, which has automatically adjusted itself to accommodate him.

The brick through the window no longer works. Now, before you can steal a car you have to steal the keys. Searching for a brick has been replaced by an act of burglary or robbery. Sometimes it is as simple as fishing through a letterbox to hook the key for the desirable 4x4 standing in the driveway; sometimes it involves kicking the door down and terrifying the woman and her children cowering in the house. In the league table of violence, car theft has moved up into the play-off zone.

Next to his wife and daughter, Jimmy Johnson’s Subaru Impreza was his pride and joy. It was the WRX model, but he’d equipped it with Speedline wheels and Milltek exhaust, and polished it until it glowed. Jimmy was a self-employed CORGI gas fitter, and was regularly on standby through the night for any reported gas leaks or heating failures. Thursday evening he’d put his daughter to bed and read her a story, then settled down with his wife to watch
Big Brother
on TV. When the phone rang he knew it was a call-out and leapt to answer it with undisguised eagerness.

Five minutes later he had reversed his work van out of his driveway and sped off towards a reported gas leak. Five more minutes later Mrs Johnson, her wide-awake young daughter resting on her hip, answered a ring of the doorbell. It had been a sunny day and was still broad daylight. The birds were singing and someone not far away was having a barbeque.

As the door swung open Mrs Johnson was knocked back into the room by a burly man who was pulling a stocking mask down over his face. She screamed and clutched the child closer to her. There were two of them, carrying steel jemmies that they used to smash a glass fruit bowl and attack the crockery on the table in a deliberate show of violence.

‘Don’t hurt us! Please don’t hurt us!’ Mrs Johnson pleaded. She fell gasping to the floor, her face growing pale as she fought to force the air out of her lungs, her arms protectively enveloping her daughter.

‘Where are the keys?’ one of the men shouted into her face, his voice blunted by the mask. ‘To the car.’

Mrs Johnson nodded towards a drawer. Her lips were blue and her breath rasped out at irregular intervals as she huddled over the child. He found the keys, then pulled the drawer right out and let it fall to the floor.

‘Good for you,’ he told her. ‘Now don’t call anybody for twenty minutes. Understand? If you do we’ll be back for the kid.’

Mrs Johnson nodded again as she struggled to breathe. She was still nodding, her back bent double to take the strain off her ribs, as the men reversed the noisy car out into the street and drove away. She didn’t phone for help. It was her
three-year-old
daughter who found the mobile, pressed the pre-set key for her daddy and told him: ‘Mummy poorly.’

My last girlfriend was an athlete. She would have made our Olympic team if it hadn’t been for injury, but she was still pretty good. We used to go running round the golf course together, and through the woods, but there was a twenty-year age difference and it soon started to show. I didn’t enjoy the running overmuch but I liked being fit, and as they say, it feels good when you stop.

I was reduced to Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings, and was enjoying the self-righteousness that punishing yourself to the edge of exhaustion induces when the phone rang. I was languishing in the shower, trying to decide between my usual chicken jalfrezi or something different from the takeaway, but the warbling reminded me that I hadn’t been out for a pint with Dave this week, and it sounded like his ring.